19 Years of Blogging - Anniversary - February 2023

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Today marks 19 years of blogging.  My very first blog post - basically a 'testing, testing' post was published on February 16, 2004.  Nineteen years feels like a really long time.  Actually...it IS a really long time.  Doing anything for nineteen years is a huge swath of time and covers close to half of my entire life.  Next year - the 20th year - feels more significant because of the 20-year-number, but nineteen gives me a chance to really reflect on the length of time I've been at it.

This past year, I continued my trend of writing one-post-per day (365 posts) and crossed my 4,000th published post back in April.  

Although the idea of publishing something online in your own venue has fallen out of favor since I fell in love with blogging back in the aughts, there has been a tiny little bump in interest recently as more people have thought about/taken the plunge to get back into blogging.  Why?  Seems a lot of the interest (or re-interest) is tied to the changes that are taking place on Twitter.  

I've maintained that writing posts at my own domain gives me a lot of freedom to explore topics of interest to me and the ability to control the home of that content thanks to data portability.   I'm sure there a untold number of fellow bloggers that have been at it for close to 20 years, but their visibility has surely dropped in favor of the platforms. 

Here's the Google Trends chart showing interest dropping since 2004 (when I started), but having little pops here and there.



What's the nineteenth year hold for me?  

More of the same.  Garden diary posts.  Disney posts.  And, writing not in service of reaching and growing an engaged audience.  But, rather...to keep the muscle from atrophy.   Sit down and post.  Every single day.  That's a way to put off the decline in body and mind.  

Here's some of the 'anniversary posts' that I've done over the years.  It seems that I skipped 2022 (18 year mark):

2022 - No Anniversary post, but 4K posts published
2021 - 17 year Blogging Anniversary
2020 - 16 year Blogging Anniversary
2019 - 15 year Blogging Anniversary
2016 - 12 year Blogging Anniversary
2014 - 10 year Blogging Anniversary
2013 - 9 year Blogging Anniversary
2011 - 7 year Blogging Anniversary

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